


No Unnecessary Killing

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [31]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 16:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6862399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night of the supply run, Furiosa sneaks into the Vault for the first time. Angharad paints, the Dag has the alethiometer, and Miss Giddy's daemon comes up with a compromise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Unnecessary Killing

Furiosa came for them long after midnight had come and gone, time drifting by through the hourglass that Cheedo sat next to, so that she could turn it the moment the sand ran out. Angharad had made white paint by dumping their allotments of cosmetics into a bowl of water, mixing the two until a thick paste was formed. Miss Giddy came out to see what they were doing only after Angharad had finished the inscription above the Vault door and had started the one around the edges of their pool. The old woman said nothing, only sighed and leaned against the stone wall. After a moment she complimented Angharad’s handwriting, and went back to her bed.

The others couldn’t sleep. Cheedo kept her clock vigil. The Dag sat a few steps below her, leaning her back against Cheedo’s shins, spinning the alethiometer’s dials slowly back and forth. The pale orange of their electric lamps were enough to read by, but she had asked Pheona, who was lying at the foot of the stairs, sprawled out pretending not to be tense, and the daemon had said it might be better not to know the answers just yet. From what Miss Giddy had told them, the alethiometer could only predict likely outcomes of the future. And things were changing too rapidly to be predictable right now.

Capable was painting with Angharad; she did one half of the pool while Angharad did the other half. She was the first to look up when the Vault door started spinning, startling so badly she almost spilled their paint bowl. Angharad steadied her with a hand on her leg, leaving white fingerprints behind.

They stood together in a cluster as they waited for the door to open. There was no guarantee it would be Furiosa. Toast put a hand on Cheedo’s shoulder, pretending it was for the youngest Wife’s comfort and not her own. The Dag leaned into Capable’s back a little, the alethiometer clutched in both hands, craning her head to see more clearly. The sudden fear in the Vault was thick enough to cut with a knife, if any of them had owned one.

Miss Giddy took a few moments to emerge, though her raven landed on a stack of books by the piano and whispered something like encouragement. By the time the History Woman had joined them, Furiosa stood in the tunnel entrance, her forehead black with grease and her metal arm shining in the light of the lamps. She had a sawed off shotgun in her human hand.

The Imperator took a few moments to look over the paintings; she even turned to see the one above the door, her silence unnerving. “Nice words,” she said at last, turning back to raise an eyebrow at the Wives. “Ready to go?”

Angharad put out a hand when Capable would have stepped forward. Adara put a gentle paw on Tarl’s back to stop his walk. “There’s one more thing, to go with those words,” Angharad said, waving white fingers towards the floor. “I want you to promise me something, Furiosa.”

Furiosa frowned, though it was not quite a scowl. The back of her neck prickled at Angharad’s deliberate use of her name, but they were running out of time. “What?” she asked, wary.

“No killing.”

“Absolutely not,” Furiosa said without a moment’s hesitation. “I won’t promise that.”

“Why not?” Adara demanded, her lioness’s voice low and rumbling through the Vault. “This is how we stay human.”

Furiosa reeled away from the words, but she also shook her head and growled. “I’m about to take you out that door and you want to _argue_ about this?” she flung out her metal arm, pointing with all three fingers towards the tunnel. Towards freedom. Angharad stood her ground.

“Yes,” she said. “This isn’t just about living, Furiosa. This is about whether or not He wins while we do.”

Furiosa had no quick answer to that; instead she made a sound almost like one of Adara’s smaller roars and took several steps back towards the tunnel. When Angharad didn’t follow, she turned back. “You were Wretched once,” Furiosa accused her, something sharp as burning stone in her voice. “You know you don’t get to _pick_ who you kill, you just kill them.”

“Not today,” Angharad said, her voice almost calm. If Furiosa’s rage was sharp, Angharad’s was like liquid metal, hot enough to burn bones but smooth on the surface. Untouchable. “No killing.”

“You’ll risk your freedom for _them_?” Furiosa asked, her eyes going out towards the Tower opposite them. It was still too dark to see it as more than a vague shape in the distance, a looming shadow. “War Boys who’d kill each other for a chance to put you back in His hands? Imperators that’d sooner rape you than look at you?”

It was almost funny, how often Furiosa sounded like the Wives when she spoke of Joe. Irreverent, hateful, frightened. Angharad said nothing. She would have argued this sooner, but Furiosa had not been seen in the Vault since her announcement of the plan, and this was the only time left. It was this, or Angharad would spill her life-blood into the water. She was not like Furiosa. She would not wait for them to throw her out of the Vault, should her last child be a girl.

She would not have her last child be a Warlord, if it was a boy. She wouldn’t give Joe a rotting piece of meat, let alone this thing that might be a son. Unconsciously, Angharad put a hand on her belly, feeling a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

Adara snarled, a quiet sound that cut through the Vault like a knife. “They are not things, no more than we are. Until they know that, we will not kill them. And neither will you.”

“You’ll doom us all if you make me promise that.” Furiosa said, her voice going flat and dead. This was worse than her anger, a million times worse. “You’ll get yourselves killed, like I knew you would. Joe will be coming after you with all the power of the Citadel, and you want me not to _kill_ anyone?” She laughed, once, a choked sound like coal falling into a bucket.

Angharad looked away first.

“What about this, then,” Leander said, and it was a relief to look to him; he’d been one of their teachers for so long now. The raven hunched his shoulders, uncomfortable with the attention, but clicked his beak and continued, “You do your best to live in Angharad’s world. The one where killing is wrong. But you still live in Furiosa’s world, and let her do war because you don’t know it, and if killing can’t be avoided then it won’t be.”

Toast bit her tongue and wouldn’t look at Angharad, which meant that she felt the same way. And if it had been any other night, if there had been _time_ , Splendid would have argued. She saw Capable shaking her head, and Cheedo clutching the Dag’s hand far too tight, and for their sake she would have brought down the world to just her words. But it was perilously close to dawn, and there was no time, just compromise.

“Alright,” she said, looking back at Furiosa. The Imperator grimaced, but she nodded. “No unnecessary killing.” Angharad insisted, and Furiosa agreed.

“Fine.”

Miss Giddy came out to hug them all, one by one, her smell of books and powdered skin the calm at the eye of the storm about to engulf them. She accepted the shotgun from Furiosa, and shocked the Imperator by hugging her too. It was the second hug Furiosa had received in seven thousand days, and if it had been daylight Angharad almost could have laughed at the surprise on Furiosa’s face. She did not return the gesture, but stood still as a statue until Miss Giddy let her go. The old woman patted Angharad’s arm as she shuffled back across the floor, held Cheedo’s hand one last time.

“Go on then,” she said, reaching out to tug on the Dag’s braid. “Get out of this place.”

Furiosa didn’t need a second invitation. She ducked out of the Vault at once, and didn’t wait for the Wives to follow her.

Their bare feet shushed across the tunnel floor, scraped against the metal of the door. The daemons kept pace, Tarl and Pheona carried in their humans’ to keep claws off stone. Furiosa led them through the long rows of hydroponics, and though the Dag would have liked to stop and stare, her arms were full of daemon and alethiometer. They went on.

There was not a soul in sight, human or daemon, in those dead hours between midnight and morning. Since they had two Towers and several Garages to walk through before they reached the War Rig, that was just as well. Even the Wretched workers who tapped and chiseled at the walls all hours of the day were sleeping, only half-alive, their daemons limp on their chests and wrapped in cloth in a vain attempt to protect them from the hungry shadows.

No shadow would go near an Imperator, let alone five full-life women with daemons that practically glowed with healthfulness. But Furiosa carried no light, and in the pitch-black of the tunnels Cheedo heard _things_ moving. Things that were not animal or daemon or even really living; invisible claws and mandibles and scales hissed and slid along the pipes. Jiemba, who could _see_ them, refused to hide in her hair and would only settle when she cupped him in between her hands, soft and warm and trembling.

The first time they crossed the bridges between the Towers, Toast looked down, and down, and down, and realized she was afraid of heights. It was not the kind of fear that paralyzed you – she had never had that kind of fear. But her kind of fear was made of bile, and shuddering, and dizziness. So Tarl shut his eyes (lucky, she thought, that he could pretend it was not happening) and Toast watched Capable’s braids leading the way, darkened to a dead kind of brunette in the starlight. She hesitated, before she put her foot on the cold metal of that trembling bridge, but she did not stop walking. If she stopped, she wouldn’t be able to start again. And she was more afraid of what lay behind her than she was of falling. Falling, by comparison, would be a dream.

At first Capable thought it was the darkness that unnerved her, the cave-dark that came when you went without a lamp or a torch in the Citadel at night. Or it could have been the creeping presence of the shadow-daemons, lurking so close. As they reached the end of the second bridge and passed into the Garage Tower, she realized it wasn’t really the darkness or the shadows that she hated, but the _silence._ During the day, surely these tunnels were filled with Wretched and War Boys and breeders and Green Thumbs. But now there was no one, and it was like the stone itself was watching, reporting on her every move. Capable bumped into Angharad’s back, walking too close, and it was not really an accident. She needed some way of reassuring herself that she was not alone. That however this ended, she wasn’t alone.

The tanker was just another shadow, black in the blackness of the garage. They came out into a huge cave, the floor sandy and spotted with oil on their feet. Furiosa walked without hesitation among the monstrous cars, but the Wives had to wind their way more slowly through the maze, and by the time they’d caught up Furiosa had slid open the door to the hold with a loud metallic scrape that had them all flinching. “Get inside.”

And it was strange that Angharad found that voice comforting, after everything. But the darkness stripped everything away, the Imperator’s grease and the cold power in the metal arm, and it was _Furiosa_ who spoke. Angharad crept close enough to reach out and feel along the spiked outline of the tanker, the place where the huge hitch extended out into the dark. She could feel Furiosa as a warmth, just beyond, but she only crawled her way up through a metal door, hauling herself out of darkness into darkness, and the smell of long-dried meat. Adara came up after her, lion’s shoulders fitting easily through the hole.

There was no place to sit, besides the things that must have been beds, because they were too low to be benches. Angharad reached out to Capable, let her fingers brush over hare-softness before wrapping around a smooth arm. It burned her that Furiosa had been right about this too; there was no room for another person in this place, not even Miss Giddy. By the time the rest of the Wives had crowded in, the air felt stale and there was no room to sit or even lie down without touching someone else’s daemon.

“Whatever you do, don’t come out until I tell you.” Furiosa’s voice echoed a little from outside the hold. “Whatever you hear, or feel, or see. Stay put until I give the all clear.”

“When will that be?” Toast asked, but the door was already sliding shut, and Furiosa didn’t answer.

They were out of the Vault.

**Author's Note:**

> My friends, my colleagues, my lovely lovely readers....WE ARE OUT OF BACKSTORY TERRITORY!!! ****confetti****  
> *rolls around in almost 60k backstory for this 2 hr movie* I hope you guys liked it! I sure loved writing it. 
> 
> And now, for my next trick: Max returns!


End file.
